The Broken Hourglass - Interview @ Clan DLan

December 23rd, 2006, 04:15

Spanish site Clan DLan has an interview with Planewalker's Jason Compton on The Broken Hourglass:

P and I - We understand that The Broken Hourglass will be based in PC-NPC interaction as opposed of fighting against monsters. What is your goal by this?JC - To be clear, both dialogue and combat are important aspects of the game--you will have to fight to survive and triumph in this game, make no mistake. But we are focusing a great deal of attention on story and character interaction, particularly between the PC and joinable NPCs, yes. Relationships, whether friendly, romantic, or antagonistic, between two or more people working in a group are a great storytelling resource.
Having strong characters with strong personalities is a huge opportunity--and frankly it is an area of game development where having the shiniest technology does not make you the winner, providing us a nice level playing field to compete with the "AAA titles" on.
So if I had to state a "goal" for character interaction, it would be that we want to create a game that makes players care as much about _who_ is involved with the plot as they do about _what_ those characters do to advance the plot.